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What the title means is have you found good people to enrich your life, surround yourself with the Power of Positive People.

Well, here is a great read by one of my all time favorite writers as well as coach, Craig Ballantyne.

Hope this helps you as much as it did me.

How to Find Good People

By Craig Ballantyne

This is one of the most important articles I could ever write for you.

Recently we had a discussion on my Facebook page about whether or not it was difficult to find good, positive, supportive people in your life.

Frankly, I don’t believe it is hard if you are willing to stand up for what you believe in, live in a way that is congruent with your beliefs, and put some effort into looking.

Who you associate with makes all the difference in your life. I once heard the incredible speaker, Dr. Nido Qubein, describe the impact of your social network using the example of the Koi fish. “The Koi fish grows in proportion to its environment. If you keep it in a pail of water, it grows only 2 inches. But if you let loose in the wild it can grow up to 2 feet,” Dr. Qubein explained. So are you like the Koi fish that has been kept in a pail? Is your environment and social network stifling your growth?

If you believe this to be so, then Dr. Qubein has a suggestion for you, “Make a list of the 10 people you spend the most time with and your top 5 goals and top 5 values. Compare the lists. Are the people you spend the most time with congruent with your values and goals? If not, you might be held back by this association.”

You need to spend more time with positive people and in a positive environment. In the weight loss world, study after study have shown that when you spend time with others who have the same goals as you, and who are making progress towards these goals, that you too will have greater success.

To help you attract the right people and positive support into your social network, here is the EarlytoRise.com Ultimate Guide to Finding Good People in Your Life

Step 1) Identify what you value in people.

Step 2) Identify where this type of person spends time.

Step 3) Go there.

Whether it is a church, gym, beach, dance lessons, bootcamp fitness class, Chamber of Commerce meeting, local lectures, weekend seminars, weekly group meetings, or a positive Internet forum, you don’t meet good people by watching TV…but good people ARE out there. Go forth and find them.

Let this quote give you some inspiration:

“When you take action, particularly bold action, the boundaries of what you believe to be possible (your belief system) expand. Which, in turn, gives you the capacity to consider new ideas, new possibilities, and new concepts that you previously thought to be impossible.” – Robert Ringer

Listen, I’m a lucky man.

The people I know and surround myself with, from my best friends from high school to the most inspirational fitness experts in the world to amazing entrepreneurs from all around the world, are people that I’ve met because I’ve lived my life with purpose and clarity.

I will not settle for less. I will not live my life according to anyone else’s expectations. I get ridiculed, called names, and criticized a lot, but it’s not going to stop me from living the way that attracts the RIGHT people into my life.

The decision to do so has been the most important I’ve made.

That’s why I’m surrounded by positive, high-energy people who are always trying to improve themselves, and who support me in my quest to be a better man.

There is my friend, Isabel De Los Rios, a woman who has shown hundreds of thousands of people how to eat better (at last check her site has over 208,000 members and over 7744 questions answered on her forum). And she did it by not settling for less and through living by example without fear of what others thought of her.

Another one of my great friends is Bedros Keuilian, who has overcome being a poor immigrant from Armenia, who didn’t speak a lick of English in 1980, and who had to “dumpster dive” for expired food to help his family eat. He too lives by example.

Then there are all the men and women in my businesses, from my business partner Matt Smith who challenges me every day to defend my arguments (we have great debates) to my Marketing Director Amy who helps me run the ship here at Turbulence Training.

All of them inspire me, and all were attracted into my life by my decision to live by example.

You may have people resist you at first, but they will come around. Many of my best friends from high school resisted healthy living, but many of them now live even healthier than me (but not by much, and we make a great friendly competition out of it).

Live and lead by example. Attract the right people into your life, both in the ‘real-world’ and on the Internet. Take full responsibility for your social network.

After all, you are responsible for your results in all areas of life. When you accept your results without casting blame and you learn from your mistakes so as to not make the same mistakes again, only then will you achieve what you want and have the right people in your life. That is how you must live and that is why you will succeed.

If what you are doing now is not working, then you must change. Don’t rely on doing “normal” things to get extraordinary results, because it doesn’t work that way. Normal and average behaviors only get you average results, and those just aren’t very good these days.

Many of the great people in my life have found me and my newsletters because I put my mission out there. I was proud of it, and I don’t care who disagrees with me. All that matters are the good people who are attracted to the mission of helping others.

Craig Ballantyne is the editor of Early to Rise and author of Financial Independence Monthly and Turbulence Training. He is also the co-creator of the Early to Rise $100,000 Transformation Contest. Though this round of the Transformation Contest has closed it’s not too late to get access to all the helpful tools and advice that has helped many people make a positive change in their lives.

Here’s to enjoying a Boundryless Life with the Power of Positive People in your Life !!

Go Easy on Yourself

Last week I was interviewed for a radio show where the host and I had a long discussion about success. We agreed success depends not only on what you do, but also what you don’t do.

But today, I simply want to open your eyes to the power of your environment. When you control your environment, you help to control your future.

Craig Ballantyne

Take action. Work hard. Never give up. Maintain your integrity. Deliver on what you promise. Now, more than ever, we need good business people.

How to Protect Yourself From Failure

By Craig Ballantyne

An alcoholic walks into a bar. An hour later, he’s drunk. Two hours later, he stumbles home.

Um, alright, that wasn’t a very good “guy walks into a bar joke,” I’m sorry.

But it is an excellent, albeit extreme example of a point I want to make today.

If we have a bad habit, putting ourselves into an environment that promotes the bad habit is the first step in making the bad habit worse. Therefore, we need to identify not only the bad habits in our lives that we want to change, but also the environments we must avoid in order to foster this change.

The other night while driving from the big city to my home in the country, I was listening to an interview with Dan Kennedy. On the call he described how he structures his weekly errands route so that he doesn’t drive by a donut shop. For Dan, a diabetic, he’s struggled with a lifelong “addiction” to donuts. So he makes the effort to remove himself from the environment that would support the addiction.

Likewise, almost every bad habit we have in our lives can be limited by removing ourselves from particular environments. For example, let’s say that you have a problem with gossip. Every day at 10 a.m. you find yourself at the proverbial water cooler in your office with the same people having the same useless, negative conversations about other people.

What’s part of the solution?

Avoiding the water cooler at 10 a.m.

You see, most bad habits can be significantly reduced by avoiding the environment, yet often we think we can have the willpower to put ourselves in that environment and somehow resist the urge to give in to the bad behavior.

Do you really think you can go to the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet at lunch while on your diet and just order a salad? That takes a strong-willed person, and really, that willpower is best left to fight against something else more important in your life. Instead of wasting the willpower on this environment, just keep yourself out of the offending place altogether.

This also applies to the people and items you bring into your own, personal environment. For example, one of my friends, nutrition expert Brad Pilon, simply recommends a “no eating in the car” rule for his readers, and this simple little suggestion helps eliminate unwanted and unnecessary calories. After all, the majority of foods you can eat in your car are on the “do not eat” list from your diet.

When you control the environment, you remove the opportunity to fall back into a bad habit. Lead yourself not into temptation and you shall do no evil.

Of course, there will be times when you’re thrown into an environment that is no good for you, and you’ll need to develop coping strategies for those times as well. But that’s another lesson for another day. Today, I simply want you to focus on two things.

First, identify the bad habits and where they most often occur. What people, places, and things contribute to your participation in activities that you want to remove from your life?

Second, identify solutions to these obstacles. For example, in the case of the water cooler gossip, avoid engaging these people in non-work related conversations. Avoid the water cooler at 10am.

I speak from experience. When I was young and foolish I would often meet my best friend in a bar on Saturday evenings. Needless to say this was not conducive to a Sunday full of relaxation and preparation for the week ahead.

In order to maintain our regular meetings and 30-year friendship, we both identified the offending environment and removed ourselves from it. Today we meet on Sunday afternoons (a day on which neither of us drink alcohol) in locations that don’t lead us into temptation and our friendship is stronger than ever.

You don’t have to lose relationships in order to better your life. You often just need to lose the offending environments that put you in harm’s way.

Put yourself in a positive environment with positive people who provide you social support and you’ll build better habits without draining your limited willpower.

[Ed. Note. Craig Ballantyne is the editor of Early to Rise and author of Financial Independence Monthly and Turbulence Training. He is also the co-creator of the Early to Rise $100,000 Transformation Contest that you are a part of today. Craig’s goal is to help one million people improve their lives by 2020, and he does this through his relevant and easy-to-relate-to content that he provides daily, weekly and monthly on his numerous sites.

Here’s to living a Boundryless Life while taking care of that VIP in your life…. YoU !! 😉

P.S. Craig is a really Awesome guy who is out to help as many people as possible…now that is AWESOME!!

Recently enjoyed learning from a wonderful person some strategies in overcoming stress that are easy to apply.

Here is a reprint of that story with link at the bottom for your reference.

How often do you wake up in the morning and dread the day ahead of you because your schedule is simply packed full of meetings, deadlines and things that only you can get done? You may even wonder how you can possibly squeeze anything else into your schedule.

So as you drive to work, you begin to organize the tasks you need to get done for the day in your mind. But then the unexpected happens when you arrive to work. Your whole day is now turned upside down.

Your pre-scheduled meetings have been rearranged and changed to different times now throughout the day due to conflicts, project deadlines have been pushed up, and key personnel are out sick. Your stress level has now just increased ten-fold.

It may seem that there’s nothing you can do about your stress level. But that is not the case. You actually have a lot more control than you may think.

So, let’s look at four strategies you can use to control your stress level in the workplace.

Strategy 1: Create A Stress Inventory

First, start by creating a stress inventory. For example, write down the situations, tasks, and events that caused you to feel stressed. Then describe your reaction to each. Did you feel frustrated, angry, or nervous?

Next, sit down and review your stress inventory. Choose one situation that you want to improve upon. Identify the problem and then come up with ways to resolve it.

For example, if you need to leave work early to pick up your children from school, then come to the office earlier, take work home to catch up on, or delegate tasks to others to get more done. The best way of coping with stress is to try to find a way to change the circumstances that are causing it.

Strategy 2: Delegate Tasks To Others

You should delegate things to others every time you have the opportunity. As a business owner, you tend to be a perfectionist, so this is often a difficult task to accomplish. The hard part to overcome is the fact that the other person may not do the task as well as you could do it yourself.

If you can delegate certain tasks to others that they can get 80% right, could you make it right in less time than it would have taken you to do it yourself from scratch? Or, is this the type of task that 80% right is acceptable so it doesn’t really matter anyway. In either situation, if the answer is yes, then that task SHOULD be delegated.

The point is “just do it.” If you don’t delegate, you will never have time to do the critical things that “only you” can do. You need to allow others to complete tasks for you.

Strategy 3: Accept The Unavoidable

Some sources of stress are unavoidable. You simply cannot prevent them or even change them. In these situations, you are forced to accept things as they are.

As a business owner, accepting what you cannot change is often times very difficult to swallow. You want to always be in the control … and, if you are not, your stress level increases.

So, rather than stressing yourself out over what you cannot control, take charge and accept what you cannot change. Focus on how to solve the problem and not the problem itself. By doing this, you will reduce your stress, while at the same time become more productive.

Strategy 4: Change Your Focus

Another way to reduce your stress meter is to change your focus and stay positive. As they say, “everything has a silver lining.”

When you focus your time and energy on being positive, your stress level will decrease. All your positive energy begins to work in a forward direction. By simply changing your focus, you alter the situation.

The way you can do this is by looking at the big picture. When you stop and put everything into perspective, is it really worth the stress? Will the problem you are currently worried about even matter next week, in a month or even next year? In most cases, it doesn’t But either way, you can still adapt or even dismiss whatever is causing your stress and move on. It’s not worth letting the stress get you down when that just takes your energy away from solving the problem.

You have the ability to control and manipulate the amount of stress that you place upon yourself, even if it seems overwhelming at times. Just stay focused on everything that is positive in your life and on solving the challenges that are in front of you. And keep charging ahead no matter what roadblocks are thrown in your way.

Note. Denise Gosnell is the CEO and Editor of ThrivingBusiness.com Inc. ThrivingBusiness.com offers various free and paid training programs to help people start and grow their own businesses, while having a thriving life. Click here to learn more.]

Here is the exact post word for word. And to learn more about Mark Ford, please read the information at the end of this post.

How to Maintain the Right Attitude When Challenged

By Mark Ford

Well, here we are in Paris.

On the plane, one of the things I thought about was the fact that, when I travel overseas, I am often less able to solve problems. I attribute that to two things:

1.An increase in my sensitivity to trouble
2. A decrease in my willingness to ask for help

I suppose it’s natural. Foreign environments cast dubious shadows.Problems that would seem ordinary back home (I can’t get my wireless working) feel critical here (the French will
never become modernized!).

In the past I’ve admitted that I suffer from that stereotypically male problem of hating to ask strangers for help. Asking in a foreign language – even one I’m modestly fluent in – makes my anxiety much worse.

The combination – timidity and sensitivity – can be debilitating.

Case in point: This afternoon, rushing to meet K at the cathedral at St. Sulpice in Paris, I couldn’t figure out how to buy a Metro ticket from the automatic vending machine. I fumbled, trying this and that. Meanwhile, a line of busy French commuters were fidgeting behind me. Finally, I gave up and left.

I was halfway up the staircase, on my way to getting a taxi, when I stopped and took a deep breath. “What are you worried about?” I thought. “If this happened to you in NYC or Chicago, would you rush out in a panic?”

I instructed my rational mind to think like I would in the States. I told my heart to do what my rational mind said.

When I got back to the machine, there was one person in front of me. Instead of fumbling around again, I asked him, “How do I use this thing?”

He gave me a quick explanation and moved away. It wasn’t enough, but it was something. And the young lady behind me, having heard the exchange, then guided me through the relatively
simple process. (I had been misinterpreting a word.)

Stepping on the Metro, I promised myself that in the future, when traveling, I would expect such problems and maintain a better attitude about resolving them.

This is true of all such situations. If you are mentally prepared to deal with them, you will. If you have the wrong attitude, you risk ruining a potentially wonderful experience.

The trick I used to overcome my Metro problem is the same trick you can use to get over virtually every barrier in your life, large or small. The trick has two simple parts, one of which I’ve never acknowledged before.

One part is this: Take action. As Robert Ringer says in his great
book, Action! Nothing Happens Until Something Moves

“I am absolutely convinced that neither success nor happiness is possible without action. … Ideas can be precious commodities that can change the world. Sound preparation is invaluable and knowledge and wisdom are essential when it comes to giving one an edge in the pursuit of great achievements. But ideas, preparation, knowledge, and wisdom are all but useless without action because action is the starting point of all progress. In other words, an idea of and by itself has no intrinsic value. It must be accompanied by action. It is action that cuts the umbilical cord and brings an idea out of the womb.”

The other part, the part I haven’t admitted to yet, is this: Change the way you are thinking.

I’ve always resisted the idea that how you think determines the success or failure of a goal, because I find most positive-thinking theories to be stupid and ineffectual. Most of the people I know who focus on getting their heads right are losers who never achieve anything in life. The most successful people I know are doers … achievers.

My argument-in-a-nutshell, to date, has been this: Don’t worry about what is going on in your mind. If you want to accomplish something, just focus on the specific behavior that will get you there. Find out the exact actions that others have taken to achieve a similar objective, and imitate those actions, step by step.

I still believe this approach is essentially sound. But I have to admit, it’s sometimes very difficult to take that first step until you have cleaned out the negative stuff in your head and replaced it with “can-do” thinking.

That’s what I did in the Metro. And, now that I think about it, that’s what I have done a thousand times in business when I knew I had to change my mind about something or lose out on an opportunity.

In a posting on his blog, Matt Furey Uncensored Group Name: ETRgoalsetting, Matt had this to say on the subject:

“Whatever you are doing with your words, pictures, and feelings in the present moment – these are YOUR FUTURE. Your future is a result of how you think about your life right now.

“Let me give you a fitness-related example. Suppose you believe you need to work out today – but you’re not looking forward to it. You’re even dreading it a bit. As a result of this, do you think you will be more or less likely to procrastinate on your workout? Do you think you will be more or less likely to have a good workout?

“All right, now change your thought to something like, ‘I love how good I feel when I’m done exercising. Exercise always makes me feel so good. I love to exercise – especially on the days I don’t want to. Those are the days that exercise does me the most good.’

“Now – as you think this thought – imagine seeing yourself working out. And as you imagine that scene, see yourself smiling, relaxed, and happy. Remove any trace of a frown from your face. See yourself laughing and having a good time – internally.

“Okay – now answer the same questions I asked earlier. Do you think you will be more or less likely to procrastinate on your workout? Do you think you will be more or less likely to have a good workout?

“My friend, it all boils down to your ‘want’ muscle. If you WANT to do something, especially if you want to do it because you LOVE doing it – well, look out. NO-thing will stand in your way. NO-thing can stop you. Not even YOU.

“Read your own mind. As impressive as it may appear to be able to pick up on another’s thoughts – your focus should be on your own thoughts MOST of the time. See what you’re thinking and make sure you keep it focused on what truly matters to you.”

So, apologies to all those who have for many years argued with me about the importance of positive thinking. Yes, I admit, it is a very important part of success. It can help you get over your fears, toughen up, and take action.

Unless you take action, nothing else will happen. So if it helps to start by clearing out the bad thoughts and replacing them with good ones, do it. Then – as Matt Furey says – you will be able to kick butt and take names!

[Ed. Note. Mark Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter. His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]